


Reasons to Fight

by hithelleth



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Fix-It, Future Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-05
Updated: 2017-06-05
Packaged: 2018-11-09 10:51:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11103048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hithelleth/pseuds/hithelleth
Summary: Clarke counts the days to when she gets her friends back. Roan counts down the days until he becomes expendable.





	Reasons to Fight

**Author's Note:**

> Post S4 finale. However, I haven’t seen the last three episodes ~~(because of obvious reasons, namely being too mad)~~ , yet, but I’ve heard a few spoilers which inspired parts of this story. You know, besides that unacceptable thing from 4x10 that needed to be fixed.

Roan comes round to something tugging at his hand, constricting his movement. Panic surges in his mind for a moment before he pushes it down and starts cataloguing his surroundings with the methodical precision he has learnt as a boy.

White and grey. The dim light that feels off, too sharp and too dull at once. Metal frames on the walls and the ceiling. A hospital bed — a _Skaikru_ hospital bed. Plastic tubes stuck in his body. Lack of clothing save his pants. A thin white sheet covering him. Various parts of his skin pulled taut, not quite itching, not quite hurting, as if from recent injury.

Black rain, he remembers.

_Willing his body to stop fighting, to still. Choking water out of his lungs. Acid drops burning into his skin as he slithered away into darkness — just for a spell, only to regain his strength, then to finish the fight._

A figure slumped in a chair not far from the bed he is in, eyes closed, her blond hair rumpled.

“Clarke.”

His own voice sounds garbled to him, breaking mid-syllable, his throat parched.

It is enough for her to stir, and a notebook tumbles to the floor from her lap, offering a glimpse of half-finished sketches — Abby and the black curls and eyes of Bellamy’s face, as she rises in a rush to retrieve a glass of water from somewhere nearby and put it to his lips. There is relief on her face he only comes to understand later.

“What did I miss?” he asks, regaining his voice after a few sips.

She shrugs. “ _Praimfaya_ came.”

“Figured that,” he bites out. “My people?”

Shame, guilt, grief bursting aflame inside him. He _failed_.

Then —

“They live.”

She frees him of tubes and wires and then makes him clean up — “spare with water”, she instructs, unnecessarily — and dress while fixing up a meal, before she fills him in on the end of the conclave, the closed bunker, the ship leaving for the remains of the Ark.

He doesn’t apologise for the harsh words he threw in her face the last time they spoke.

His people — though but a hundred of them — survive no thanks to her.

She doesn’t apologise, either, despite the guilt and regret haunting her eyes.

They retreat into themselves, avoiding each other, apart from when the necessity of survival forces them to perform the tasks that require both of them.

Clarke cleans and organises and studies — and sometimes draws, her eyes going distant into memory or wishful daydream and he takes care she doesn’t catch him noticing, or perhaps she only pretends not to.

He wanders around, aimlessly, scanning their cage-shelter over and over until he knows every inch of it, and numbs his mind with as strenuous exercise as he can come up with in the enclosed space.

They clash, yell, fight, throwing harsh words and their pain at each other, and then go silent again until the next time, the cycle repeating itself until the hurt has flown its course to the point of becoming bearable and the lulls become less strained, companionable, the sparks of kinship reigniting in the harmless barbs and that deep-rooted understanding that has been there for almost as long as they have known each other.

Inevitably, they fuck.

The first time it happens after one of those fights sprouted no longer out of pain and resentment but of all too normal everyday frustration that could have happened anywhere, anytime, with or without _praimfaya._

He presses bruises into the softness of her skin. She scratches his scars open. Both brutal, both beyond the need for the pleasure of flesh — slick, loud, scorching — digging and clawing their way into each other in desperation to remind themselves they are not alone.

Because, but for each other, they _are_ alone.

The last nightbloods.

_They found him by Octavia’s directions to where she had last seen him, Clarke tells him — and he remembers: voices, hands, the heaviness in his body, being moved and rattled, glimpses of the inside of the rover and the figures clothed in head-to-toe Skaikru gear, the roar of the boat — and brought him here, gave him what was left of the nightblood serum._

If the bunker failed, if the Ark pod can’t make the landing — provided it reached its destination in the first place — they may just as well be the last _people_ alive.

Following the thought further could only lead into madness. He lets it be.

When it is safe to open their shelter, they find the nature alive. It shouldn’t be possible, according to Clarke, not so soon, but _sonraun na fig wonwe au_ , Roan thinks. _Life will find a way._

They are not alone.

The kids — the first girl half-starved, the other two any better only for the fact that they are two and together — are like abandoned wolf cubs, slightly feral, old enough to somehow survive on their own out of sheer instinct if nothing else, too young to survive well, smart enough to use what fortune brings them.

The kids look at Clarke and him wide-eyed with a little awe and a lot more fear and distrust; they are, after all, _Wanheda_ and _Azhefa,_ terrible names, larger-than-life in the children’s minds.

Suspicion, though, wages a lost war against Clarke’s heart, fierce in its decisiveness. Battle after battle, it gets defeated and then obliterated while the children grow stronger and healthier.

Clarke fusses over keeping them relatively clean, takes them looking for medicinal plants, and teaches them about healing, which he might listen in while fixing up his weapons. He takes them hunting and teaches them — and Clarke — how to fight and then shares the traditions and tales of his people to counter the bits and pieces from the _Skaikru_ stories Clarke begins telling the children in the evenings — it is the kids who point out that some of the latter overlap.

They still fight, of course, too stubborn and volatile not to when bumping at disagreeing viewpoints. Then they find compromises, common grounds, and move on.

They become _Clarke_ and _Roan_ , their names first tried, tested, hesitant on the children’s tongues, then spoken as owned, infused with loyalty and — something he finds hard to fathom, to get used to — affection.

Life, he learns, can be simple happiness of children inventing a play and dragging him in along with Clarke, of shared concern and care and laughter and a quiet meal after a long-day’s work, of falling asleep with Clarke night after night.

_The first time, it was a fight-and-fuck exhaustion that saw them fall asleep entwined. Then it was convenience, or so they told themselves, in the limited space of their shelter. Next came excuses that it was safer and more economical to stay in one room, in one bed, despite all the space in ALIE’s mansion._

Tenderness sneaks between them, catches him unawares, catches _them_ unawares.

They don’t speak of it. Instead, they fuck hard and fast, stealing moments away from the kids during the day or in the dark of night as he pins her to the bed and swallows her screams with his mouth, contrasting the times when their hands and lips insist on caressing touches that burn bright, sweet, and no less crushing for it.

He listens to her picking up the radio every day, watches her count the days.

Clarke counts the days to when the doors open, when the ship lands, when she gets to see her mother again, when she gets her friends and Bellamy back.

Roan, too, counts. He counts down the days until he becomes expendable.

When the time comes, they go to Polis.

The bunker opens.

The thirteen clans have survived. More than survived. Thrived.

It took time and effort to adjust to living together. But they did, choosing the leaders to follow, some old, some new, and the people who emerge from the bunker are no longer of thirteen clans, but of one, _Ogeda_.

The new people may not have forgotten all old issues between the clans, but survival demanded those be laid to rest. In turn, friendships have been forged and unions formed between people from different clans — there are even a couple of kids (just as there have been a few deaths), and by the looks of it Roan expects soon to be more.

He declines the invitation to join the _Ogeda_ council — the unified people have no need of a king, least of all an Ice Nation one — leaving the position to the man who seems to have been doing a good job in it so far.

While the bunker survivors go about resettling Polis, designing Arkadia as an outpost, a spaceship lands in the South.

_Skaikru_ weren’t the only _skaikru_ in space, it turns out. _Skaikru_ , of course, are not surprised: the people who come down from space were thought to have been lost before the first _praimfaya_ ; they call themselves miners and the name takes only a short time to stick.

Roan trusts the _Ogeda_ leaders to negotiate territory boundaries and the terms of alliance while he returns East with a small group that sets off to wait for the Ark pod that should land near ALIE’s island.

The wait turns weeks into months, months into a year.

Clarke persists, trying to radio every day, an air of stubborn hope about her as she rechecks supplies and redoes the inventory over and over, readying the facilities.

Each day gifted to him is a torture to her. The knowledge purges any little selfish impulse; all he wishes is for it to end already.

There was trouble with equipment and a run-in with the miners that delayed the return, they learn later.

Because at last, the pod lands.

When the group from the Ark makes it to the island, Clarke throws herself in Bellamy’s arms and they hold each other so tightly it is a wonder they keep breathing.

Roan hardly notices the woman who sinks on her knees before him.

“Sire. You live.”

He forces himself to tear his eyes away from the pair, glimpsing the rest, sounds breaking through his haze, cries of happiness; there is the mechanic and _fri—_ Emori and the others.

“You don’t have to kneel, I’m no longer your king,” he tells Echo.

She misunderstands, turns away with a stricken face as she rises.

He reaches out, stops her with his hand on her arm, and revokes her banishment there and then.

As they get ready to head for Polis, he packs up as well.

“I’m going north, to see what happened to my people,” he tells Clarke. “Maybe there are other _natblida_.”

She accepts it with a sharp nod and doesn’t call him out on the fact that he could have already done that in the past six years.

Before leaving, she finds him, alone.

“Will you come back?” she asks to his back.

_“Why do you care,”_ he wants to spit, _“you have your Bellamy now —”_ because that what _he_ is _“— you don’t need me anymore.”_

The Clarke he sees when he turns looks vulnerable. The harsh thought dissipates. But before he can think of something, anything softer to say, she squares her shoulders and there is the girl who ended worlds, living, breathing, hurting, determination and strength wrapped around the fragility few can see.

Somewhere between animosity and friendship, battles and truces, alliances and betrayals, she stole his heart, piece by piece, splitting him raw.

“Come back,” she says.

_“I don’t take your orders, great Wanheda,” he grits, and she hisses in his face, “Well, I don’t take yours, either.”_

She must know it is a promise he can’t make.

He roams the _Azgeda_ lands for months. _Praimfaya_ has left desolation in its wake from which only nature gets to be reborn. He finds nothing.

He passes through Polis on the way back. Unsurprised, he hears the remaining of those counted among the first hundred have claimed Arkadia for themselves. He doesn’t bother to stop for the night, just long enough for a meal and to talk to Kane.

Arkadia greets him silent, sleeping.

At the late hour, a sole guard stands watch, be it out of habit or due to _mainon_ in the South. A good choice in any case, Roan believes. Can’t hurt being careful; those who reside within have learnt that the hard way.

Miller uses few words as he opens the gates and directs him to the spare quarters. Inside, however, Roan finds what little he left behind on the island, the only unfamiliar thing a tablet on the small desk.

It would be a waste not to store his things, he tells himself while he takes a shower and changes for bed. Sleep evades him, though, and after a while he gives up and picks up the tablet, turning it on in hopes of perhaps learning some news of late.

What he finds are messages, so distinctively Clarke-like he would know without the signature, entry after entry, for every day of his absence, the last one but hours old.

He reads into the passing night and only manages to catch some sleep when dawn is nearly breaking behind the horizon, waking in a few hours to the voices of people going around their morning.

When he steps outside, Clarke is leaning against one of the pillars supporting an overhang, sun shining in her hair.

The unbridled joy on her face as she turns to him blinds him, knocks the wind out of him, stops time. Then the kids swarm him, shouting over each other. _Later_ , he understands when Clarke walks away with a smile and a gentle reminder to the kids to mind their manners.

She comes to his bed that night.

They lie facing each other, but quiet, just looking at one another, for a long time.

“I haven’t slept with Bellamy.”

It is the last thing he expects her to say, so it must be shock that makes him ask, “Why?”

She furrows her brow, and then scowls.

“You think I’d just jump from your bed to his?”

Roan shrugs. “Why not?”

“Jackass.” She punches him, her fist connecting with his shoulder hard enough to hurt, then winces. “Fuck.”

She rubs the knuckles that must be stinging from the impact with her other hand with a few jerky moves until he reaches for her hand and takes over the task himself.

“You are indispensable to me,” she tells him in a voice that brokers no argument, taking his breath away for the second time in a day.

He doesn’t attempt to find what to say with the emotion tightening in his chest, only closes the distance between them and pulls her in his arms.

~ FIN ~

**Author's Note:**

> Do tell me what you think. Comments are always welcome.


End file.
